We are a mid-size company with a project slightly smaller than Pillars of Eternity, but same quality. They use Unity, supporting Windows, Linux and Mac. We also intend to use Unity.
Our project has these platforms: Windows Linux Mac Android iOS
What Unity-related costs can we expect in this respect? (Ratio/distribution is also fine)
I can think of these cost types here:
General Unity development (result supports all platforms)
Pillars of eternity ran a successful kickstarter and raised 4 million dollars, so if you wish to make a slightly smaller version then let’s say 3.5 million dollars.
As for the rest of the questions, look around the website all those answers are there.
It was too late to edit the thread title, but I meant the “Unity-related” or “development-related” costs. We have a business plan and proper funding as well, we are only interested in the distribution of Unity-related costs. (Pillars was just a sample, we aren’t affiliated with them in any way, and our product is fully unique in terms of ideas and content.)
Well, those were the only questions. We’re new to Unity (first product coming). We read all stuff, but the big image is missing. Can you be so kind to provide some links? The Unity-related (even official) web content is tremendously huge. (No, it doesn’t help much to know which technical aspects – such as input handling – matter. This is not quantitative, aggregated info. We need some estimation on the distrbution of actual worktime between platform-free and platform-specific Unity development. I know it’s project dependent, but it’s obvious that it can be estimated generally.)
Unity-related is a bit vague as the tools for building games are going to be identical regardless of the platform. Simply put once you hit $100,000 gross annually, and you will hit this almost immediately when you launch, you need to buy licenses for Unity Pro along with any additional platforms.
Unity Pro covers Windows, OS X, and Linux as well as web development. There is a license for Android and one for iOS. A perpetual license is a one-time cost of $1,500 for each ($4,500 total for the ones you want to support) and a subscription is $75/mo for each ($225/mo total) with a minimum period of one year. In case it may not be obvious these are per seat.
For my projects (on a much smaller scale) there is very little time decimated to cross platform support. I change the platform, hit build, and I’m done.
Most of the time in platform specific development is implementing specific platform features, like advertising, IAP and the like. That said there are multi platform back ends that will take care of much of this for you.
If you design a flexible game, which works across platforms, you won’t need 10 hours per platform of Desktop.
Android, iOS are different story. They do require lots of optimizations. Once again if you have done core parts of the game right, you won’t have much of problems in the future when porting.
Nobody knows your team structure. How many people need a license? How many need a license for which device? How long is the development time (for each individual team member)?
You should be able to answer that on your own. Here are the licenses.
On my view multiplatform is not a matter of the engine. Also it depends heavily on your individual structure and the project. Any estimation can’t be taken serious without concrete facts to measure on.
For the most part, Unit’s cross-platform features work really well.
Build your Canvas with a CanvasScaler (at the highest resolution you are targeting) and setup to scale appropriately. Then, you just need to worry about native libraries for each platform. We minimize that whenever possible by using 3rd party plugins for storekits, et al. Over several platforms, across a variety of projects, I’d estimate about 15% platform coding/support vs 85% game/engine coding.
Gigi
PS - Unless you have a well-established IP, targeting so many platforms at once is likely a massive waste of time/effort. Consider choosing either MOBILE or PC. And, I personally wouldn’t target Linux or Mac until MUCH later.
Like been said if you are trying to do the same game for both Desktop and Mobiles you have to be prepare to use a lot more to mobile hour estimates, maybe even more than desktop depending what devices are you supporting, how complex the game is and what type the gameplay is.